- cross-posted to:
- 404media@rss.ponder.cat
- cross-posted to:
- 404media@rss.ponder.cat
Title is a little sensational but this is a cool project for non-technical folks who may need a mini-internet or data archive for a wide variety of reasons:
“PrepperDisk is a mini internet box that comes preloaded with offline backups of Wikipedia, street maps, survivalist information, 90,000 WikiHow guides, iFixit repair guides, government website backups (including FEMA guides and National Institutes of Health backups), TED Talks about farming and survivalism, 60,000 ebooks and various other content. It’s part external hard drive, part local hotspot antenna—the box runs on a Raspberry Pi that allows up to 20 devices to connect to it over wifi or wired connections, and can store and run additional content that users store on it. It doesn’t store a lot of content (either 256GB or 512GB), but what makes it different from buying any external hard drive is that it comes preloaded with content for the apocalypse.”
Why not both?
Money. Raid 1 would make every Prepper Drive cost a lot more, since it would need double the storage space. Fewer people will buy them. Instead, keep them cheap and let the people who are truly concerned about redundancy solve the problem themselves by buying two.
You wanna tell me a 256/512GB SSD is that expensive?
I think to believe the prepper this targets are the same that build a bunker for 6 figures in their backyard.
In all seriousness: SSDs (even enterprise grade excluding brand tax) are not that expensive.
A quick Googling puts them around $50. The PrepperDisk is priced at $270 (Canadian dollars in both cases). So add a second drive and it jumps to $320, plus the cost of whatever additional complexity there is to the motherboard to support it, plus extra development cost for the RAID controller. And the device itself becomes bulkier.
Sure, this satisfies the handful of people who were concerned about that. Everyone else ends up with what’s basically the same product but more expensive and bulkier. I can easily see the developers deciding that’s a net loss for sales.